Sites should consider adding in a social toolbar to their pages; this has multiple benefits for a wide range of different website owners, from companies through to higher education institutions – they boost your interactivity, enable faster communication, and allow you to better track visitors. Social toolbars can be downloaded and installed on your site via Content Management Systems, or they can be customised and produced using your own code, but generally provides the same strengths in terms of allowing more content to be shared by users.

As well as social toolbars, you do have the option to use social media buttons, or clickable icons that can be placed next to content. This approach has its own advantages, with users able to rapidly share your content. However, social toolbars go one step further by enabling features like opening instant messaging chats on your page, and syncing up with your institutions social profiles and updates.

Most social toolbars will feature links to the most popular networks, which effectively means Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google Plus. Other social networks can also be added, though. Jake Rocheleau provides a useful overview of the different social toolbars currently available, as well as how these vary in terms of their use of Content Management Systems and custom HTML and CSS – WordPress and Blogger templates are popular for websites that want an easy to use interface, for example.

One of the most social toolbars that can be added to your site is Meebo, which allows for IM chats to be opened, as well as content from other networks to be displayed through a single toolbar. Meebo’smain strength is that it consolidates different instant messaging platforms, which include ICQ, Facebook Chat, and Yahoo, while also synchronising with mobile pages.

Higher education institutions can particularly benefit from Meebo, whereby students using different social media can communicate with admissions officers and other staff through a single chat program – by increasing and simplifying access, prospective students can quickly find out information on courses and an institution. Existing students can similarly use social toolbar chat to check on their progress and any problems with their records. When combined with mobile access, social toolbars can add another channel for students to engage with institutions.

It’s also possible to avoid social toolbars slowing down large scale educational and other sites by customising them with PhPlugins. TheTurningGate.net recommends using these PHPlugins to make changes to stylesheets for toolbars, whereby you can make sure that everything connects up with your HMTL and CSS layouts – this can be a good idea if you’ve had problems with loading JavaScript on your sites in the past.

You can also build your own social toolbars using HTML and JavaServer pages, which can involve developing custom themes, and creating hidden portal labels to better manage toolbars; these can then be incorporated into CSS layouts and combined with the right tags for image icons and stable URLs –Tim Reilly recommends using WebSphere Portal 8 as a way for building up a social toolbar that’s specific to your website, and to any existing features that it might have.

However you design them, though, social toolbars are going to be essential in a future where more people will expect intuitive leaps between their social media profiles and other sites – the use of toolbars on mobile devices also means that users will be able to rely on simplified apps to gain access to content, and will be able to reproduce a social experience like a group chat without having to actually leave a page. The end result should be improved access, both for users browsing commercial sites, and for instances like higher education pages, where students need to get information and communicate with staff without social media compatibility issues.

This post was written by Rob James.